An enterprise may have a legal or other obligation and/or an internal policy that requires selected content to be retained in a particular manner and/or for a prescribed period. Record management systems dedicated to preserving and disposing of records, e.g., to satisfy U.S. Department of Defense and/or other external and/or internal specifications, policies, and other requirements regarding maintenance, retention, and disposition of records have been provided, but to date no effective way to selectively apply a retention policy, or a selected one or more of a plurality of retention policies, to selected items of content comprising a body of managed content, e.g., a body of content managed by a content management system, application, and/or platform, has been provided. Moreover, in a typical managed content system each item of stored content, e.g., each file or other file system object, etc., has associated with it metadata used to track, locate, control and manage access to, and/or provide one or more other content management functions with respect to the corresponding content item. In many cases, an enterprise or other content owner may be required and/or may desire to enforce with respect to such metadata the same retention policy or policies and/or other requirements applicable to the underlying content item with which the metadata is associated.
Therefore, there is a need for a way to ensure that items of content and their associated metadata are retained and disposed of in parallel.